Reflecting on the confusion, shame and grief brought on by her mother's schizophrenia, Amy Simpson provides a bracing look at the social and physical realities of mental illness. Reminding us that people with mental illness are our neighbors and our brothers and sisters in Christ, she explores new possibilities for the church to minister to this stigmatized group.

Many of us take our mental health for granted. But when confronted by mental illness in family members, friends or ourselves, even the most competent can become overwhelmed.Understanding Troubled Minds guides us calmly and authoritatively through the full range of mental illnesses and their treatment, and includes chapters dealing specifically with mental illnesses afflicting women, children and the elderly. It stresses the value of partnerships between psychiatrists, patients and their families.Balanced, humanistic and thoroughly readable, this fully revised edition of Understanding Troubled Minds serves as a practical guide to mental illness and its treatment.

Mind Fixers tells the history of psychiatry’s quest to understand the biological basis of mental illness and asks where we need to go from here. In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds. But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry into a state of crisis that a new “biological revolution” was meant to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science, and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis in our own time. Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Government programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, industry profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the story as well. In focusing particularly on the search for the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high human stakes for the millions of people who have sought medical answers for their mental suffering. This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones. A clear-eyed, evenhanded, and yet passionate tour de force, Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future, both for those who suffer and for those whose job it is to care for them.

‘Highly eloquent, fascinating and deeply compassionate’ Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm We cannot know how to fix a problem until we understand its causes. But even for some of the most common mental health problems, specialists argue over whether the answers lie in the person’s biology, their psychology or their circumstances. As a cognitive neuropsychiatrist, Anthony David brings together many fields of enquiry, from social and cognitive psychology to neurology. The key for each patient might be anything from a traumatic memory to a chemical imbalance, an unhealthy way of thinking or a hidden tumour. Patrick believes he is dead. Jennifer's schizophrenia medication helped with her voices but did it cause Parkinson’s? Emma is in a coma – or is she just refusing to respond? Drawing from Professor David’s career as a clinician and academic, these fascinating case studies reveal the unique complexity of the human mind, stretching the limits of our understanding.

Originally published in 1928 in the Psyche Miniatures Medical Series, this title was an attempt to bring to the attention of British psychologists and psychiatrists some aspects of the work and thought of French psychologist Charles Blondel. Well known abroad but little known in England at the time, he was professor of Psychology at the University of Strasbourg and founder of a school of ‘morbid psychology’. This book contains two papers, the first concerning the theory of the disordered mind and the second deals with the relation between disordered thought and speech. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context.

Every society has its own definition of a normal and an abnormal human condition. For persons living with mental disorders, these concepts have a tremendous impact. This study investigates how the abnormal mind is culturally defined in Malaŵi, South-Eastern Africa. Based on anthropological techniques such as interviews, participant observation, and archive research, it explores the different social dimensions of mental disorder - e.g. its reflection in traditional dance rituals, in behavioural rules during pregnancy, or in the healing ministry of independent churches. It demonstrates how local explanations of mental disorder - be it witchcraft, an angry ancestor, or the will of God - determine the social acceptance of an affected person's condition. Recent processes of cultural change, however, strengthen the pluralism of Malaŵian religious landscape, opening the local debate to an ever wider range of interpretations.

Offers a detailed insight into how children's emotions affect their learning and delivers key lessons on how we can better connect with both the head and the heart during the teaching and learning process. How are we to think of the disruptive or destructive child? Drawing on over 25 years of working with children with challenging behaviour, Peter Nelmes argues that such children are members of a community who are possibly the least recognised, understood and accepted in society whose problems are often met with condemnation rather than understanding and support. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies, he sets out to answer the question as to why emotional difficulties grief, trauma and abuse very often diminish a child's capacity for learning. By explaining this phenomenon he gives anyone who works with such children a framework for understanding how emotions play out in the classroom and a way of thinking about how the heart and the brain relate to each other in practice. If you have ever struggled to teach or even just connect with a troubled child, then this book is for you.